This week it will be exactly a year since my husband Tom sat beside his mother at Southampton Hospital and they received the news that, not only was her cancer back, but that it was terminal.

That’s when it really started.

There was my husband, aged 44, with no father, no siblings and devastated that his mother wouldn’t reach 70. That news, and the raw emotion that followed, didn’t change the fact he was responsible for his own four children, aged five, eight, ten and 12.

My husband works full-time and our home in Somerset is a good hour-and-a-half away from where he grew up, and even further away from Southampton Hospital, which was soon to become the centre of his life.

For with my mother-in-law’s terminal diagnosis, my husband instantly became one of Britain’s 2.4 million ‘sandwich carers’ — those whose parents are sick and whose children are still dependent.

Tom, 44, from Somerset, had to spend time away from his family after his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lives an hour and a half from where he grew up, and has no siblings (file photo)

In the UK, one in eight of us is identified as a carer (6.5 million) and the number of middle-aged female carers (aged 50-64) has risen by 13 per cent in the past ten years to 1.2 million.

While there is a fairly even split between male and female carers (58 per cent are women, 42 per cent men), it is women who are more likely to care for their parents in middle age. In other words, ‘male’ carers are often over 65 and caring for their spouse.

The sandwich carers tend to be the females — daughters, daughters-in-law, nieces. Carers UK says this is because women are more likely to work part-time to manage childcare. They simply step in.

They’re also — it pains me to say — probably more equipped to handle ‘intimate care’, the washing, the brushing of hair, the massaging of hands and feet. But not all families have females. My husband’s mother wanted her son and he wanted her, too. Nobody thinks of men as sandwich carers, but they are. There are just fewer of them.

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Sivan Isaacs, 41, a financial adviser from Callander in Perthshire, became a sandwich carer four years ago after his mother, Jeannie, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

His children were nine and six and his wife worked full time. His mother’s decline lasted half a year, but it was for the last two months that he made the decision, with his wife, to move into his mother’s home, which was at least in the same village.

His employers were, he remembers, sympathetic, allowing him a couple of months of compassionate leave: ‘I missed the children terribly,’ he remembers, ‘but I put my mother first.

‘I hardly saw my kids for several weeks before the end. I never left my mother’s house.

He became one of Britain’s 2.4 million ‘sandwich carers’ — those whose parents are sick and whose children are still dependent (file photo)

‘For the final three weeks, my brother, who has even younger children than I do, also moved in. I suppose I looked back over my life and thought how much I’d always taken her for granted. I felt so guilty about that.

‘It was my way of paying her back for everything she’d done for us. Of everything in my life, I think I’m most proud of what I was able to do for my mum.

‘She had cared for me for 40 years. How could I not do that for her? My wife knew that if the shoe was on the other foot, she’d want to do the same.’

Christopher Clement-Davies, 57, his twin Simon and younger brother David, 53, also provided as much support as they could for their 90-year-old mother, Joanna, in her final years.

Christopher has sons Louis, 11 and Alexander, 13, and Simon, a seven-year-old daughter Allegra. The three brothers rotated their mother’s care, each living in her home in north-west London for three months at a time, often with the children there, too.

This was in addition to professional carers four times a day: ‘We wanted to give my mother a stimulating family environment,’ says Christopher, a lawyer and entrepreneur who’s divorced.

But the arrangement was not without its sacrifices. The twin brothers often felt torn between the needs of their mother, their children and work, which ‘made it really complicated,’ Christopher remembers. There would be phone calls at work about disastrous things that had happened and one of the sons would go hurtling over to sort it out.

A similar thing happened to us. My mother-in-law was fiercely independent of spirit and refused to be broken by her cancer. She hated the idea of being cared for by strangers and loved her own home. It gave her immense security in what was a terrifying time. But it did mean Tom and I were separated by distance.

While sandwich carers tend to be women, men are also struggling with challenge (file photo)

Once, when my husband was so worn out and broken by her suffering, I booked a family lunch in London for his 45th birthday.

We climbed into the car and drove up from our home in Somerset. Then my husband’s mobile rang — always a source of anxiety if you have a sick parent. The problem was so urgent I sped straight to her house. He ran in to co-ordinate the care the out-of-hours service couldn’t provide, while I drove our four children in their Sunday best to London. We had his birthday lunch without him.

Of course, your own family life falls away to be replaced by what is more important. It is still family life, but of the bleaker kind.

How my husband puts it now is that caring for your parent provides a chance to show and share the love in deeds, not just words. But there are always dilemmas.

One of my mother-in-law’s operations was on our third child’s birthday — ‘I want to be there when they both wake up,’ my husband emailed, sadly. He rightly chose his mother.

Near the end, when she deteriorated so much she was admitted to hospital, Tom was away full-time, his grief compounded by missing the children. His mother had a tracheotomy, couldn’t speak, could barely breathe, but it was tiny things that uprooted him. Illness is a dreadful deadener like that. Something awful happens, you cope and acclimatise.

It was bringing in the wrong glasses for his mother, or not being able to find her book, that reduced him to tears.

He came home late one night to see me and sleep in his own bed and as he left around 6am to be there for her waking, I gave him some sweet peas from the garden to put by her bedside.

‘Keep it upright,’ I told him.

‘I missed the children terribly, but I put my mother first. I hardly saw my kids for several weeks before the end. I never left my mother’s house

He remembers pulling into a layby, with the vase on its side, clueless about how to handle this ridiculous request of mine. It was all too much: ‘And so I strapped the vase into the passenger seat,’ he said. ‘The vase was like having you next to me.’

My husband is not the most practical of men and perhaps this is a gender thing. Maybe all male sandwich carers find this particularly hard?

I tried to help, but the children had to be kept on an even keel.

A granny dying but not yet gone is a difficult concept for a child to grasp, but neither a mummy nor a daddy at breakfast or supper as usual is what really caused my children distress.

I was torn because I wanted to support the man I love caring for the other woman he loved.

Male sandwich carers need their partners more than ever, but children often make it difficult. Mine didn’t want endless babysitters. But male sandwich carers also need to be told: ‘Go! Don’t worry about us!’ so there’s no guilt.

Vikas Vedi, 50, an orthopaedic surgeon who lives in Buckinghamshire, had the blessing of his wife Ujuala, 46, from the word go. Ten years ago, they moved from Hounslow, West London, with children, Nikhil, now ten, and Akhil, seven, to Gerrards Cross and brought with them to their bigger home Vikas’s parents Surrinder, 84, and Yash, 81.

Vikas foresaw his parents’ declining health. His father is now almost blind and his mother has acute kidney failure.

Before he starts his 12-hour-day at Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Trust, Vikas and his wife prepare his parents’ breakfast: ‘Dad has two fish fingers or poached eggs, toast and a cocktail of different cereals. Mum has cereal with a protein supplement. I can do it in ten minutes flat.’

There is a housekeeper, but at weekends, Vikas cooks lunch, too. His wife does the shopping and he runs errands for his parents. He often misses the children’s school events and has calls at work from his parents.

He is, he says, pulled in all directions, despite his parents ‘trying very very hard not to disturb or interfere in our lives’.

‘When I get home from work, my children are saying “Daddy, Daddy!” and my parents might want me, too. It’s very tough, and there is a lot of pressure.

‘But I wouldn’t be the person I am, not a surgeon, not a doctor, if it weren’t for my parents.’

His sister lives in Canada, but phones daily, and his brother, in Cardiff, covers for him when the family goes on holiday.

Vikas is now able to manage his own timetable, but not all men are as lucky, and, according to Carers UK, unequal societal norms (women do the caring, men go out to work) mean men are less equipped at asking for time off.

My advice? Encourage your husband to take as much time off as he can get. Tom’s employers were fantastic. His boss said: ‘You only have one mother.’

Some illnesses such as dementia are long term. Families need incomes, bills need to be paid.

Yet, when death is looming, all the sandwich men I spoke to said time spent caring for their loved one was precious.

By the end, my husband was on compassionate leave.

With help from his mother’s friends and her goddaughter, most of his mother’s final illness was spent at home.

So many of my husband’s pleasures in life — reading, writing, crosswords, Scrabble, dogs, black humour — came from his mother. In the run-up to her death, they were fantastic companions and sat together for hours in quiet mutual contentment. It is a consolation, now.

And on the night death looked imminent, she was in her own bed where she had slept for 45 years. We sat round her, drinking Champagne. She dipped her finger in, licked it and smiled.

We played her favourite Sixties music and our dog, a present from her eight years before, was on her bed. Somebody played a hunting horn under her window. The moon was bright. She was so glad to be home.

‘A son is a son until he takes a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life,’ goes the saying. In our case, my husband was her son till the end and will always be her son — just like I hope my son will always be mine.